Meringue Powder

Yikes it's been a long time since I posted anything! I've been working on a couple of other things at the moment so there hasn't been much time. I started the following blog post a few weeks ago and I hope you don't mind me posting it. Maybe you're still in the mood for sugar cookies or still in the Christmas spirit. I don't know.

Here it is a few weeks late:

With Christmas just around the corner I thought it would be a good time to blog about a sugar cookie recipe I found that is perfect for the holiday season. I found this recipe in the Good Housekeeping book and I used an icing recipe I found online. Before I tell about my sugar cookie adventure I think its important to tell you that this is not one of the recipes that just happens. What I mean by this is, is simply that in no way shape or form will you make this with perfection unless you are God or Martha Stewart. (Keep in mind I made these cookies on the Monday before Thanksgiving)


In my mind, I pictured the following scenario:

(No exaggeration)

I made the cookies wearing a super fabulous apron. I didn't spill a thing. My hair was perfect. My makeup was perfect. Christmas songs played in the background. I say along to the songs in a voice that was unrealistically harmonious, kind of like Ariel in the Little Mermaid. I cut leaf shaped cookies out and they cooked perfectly in the oven. I painted them in fall colors with homemade icing I had dyed. The icing went on smooth. It was glorious. Jason came home from work, kissed my forehead, and tasted the cookies and said they were delicious.Why wouldn't they be, I made them. I placed them in cute bags, labeled them with tags that said "Happy Thanksgiving! Love, The Yarbroughs" and tied them with neat perfect bows, because I'm an excellent bow tier so this would make perfect sense. I delivered them to my neighbors and family who were delighted by them. It was magical. ____________________________________________________________

Here's how it really went... I'll start from the beginning. Filled with the spirit of the holiday season I decided to bake some sugar cookies and ice them with homemade icing with the above mentioned scenario in my head. I really believed it would be effortless and it would take me an hour at most. I used a sugar cookie recipe from the Good Housekeeping book and an icing recipe I found further down the page that called for Meringue Powder. What the heck is meringue powder?! Of course, I didn't have it and had never heard of it anyway so off to the Casey Jones (our local supermarket) I went.


SIDENOTE: Have I told you how much I love our Casey Jones? I can't remember. Well I do. I love it. It's not like Wal-mart where I dodge carts like I'm in a bumper car cage and people ram into you like they're on speed. And God forbid you actually fall over because at Wal-Mart they would roll their cart right over your body. People at Wal-Mart scare me. At the Casey Jones its like you stepped into Mayberry well a different kind of Mayberry anyway. People know each other there and ask about your family and how your tomatoes plants did this year. Once when I was there, a woman hollered down the isle, "how's your mama" and a girl yelled back, "she's good, she's in jail." and everyone smiled and chuckled a little. Local New Orleans grocery stores. I wouldn't change a thing about them.

Back to the main story: So I'm here at the Casey Jones and one of the managers comes flying by with a very big mission, who knows what. I say excuse me, I can't find meringue powder and he drops everything he's doing. Meringue powder?.....he scratches his chin. He's walks one way then he walks the other way. He scans the shelves. More determined then ever he calls over other employees. Suddenly I felt like I was on a battlefield where troops were being dispatched to war-ridden area by the general. He barked out orders 'John! miscellaneous baking goods isle!" "Frank! isle 8!" The manager takes off on his own mission and I am left standing there blinking. I follow John to the miscellaneous baking isle and begin scanning shelves. Turns out none of the store's troops could find it. Finally we give up and the manager comes flying over with pages in hand. "Here", he says handing them over to me. "I googled it." Pages about Meringue powder and what to use instead. He apologizes for not having it and tells me some stores to check. If they don't have it come back and I'll order it, he says.

Wow.

This is customer service. :)

I go home and flop myself on the couch, not defeated but amazed.

After alot of thought, I decided not to go with Meringue powder (which seems to exist only on Google) but I googled a pretty great icing recipe that seemed to work just fine.

On the day I finally made the cookies, it took the WHOLE day. I was covered in flour all over my super cute apron, my face, my baseball cap that covered my not so cute hair. I made a horrible mess of the kitchen. I played Christmas songs but I sang them with no hope of a singing career. The cookies tasted awesome but God love them they didn't look like leaves and the icing colors were too bright to be considered fall colors. The icing was a mess, I had a tough time painting it on the cookies and I ended up with more on me than on the cookies. In the end, I ziplocked bagged them, I never attached a cute note to them and I never distributed to my friends and family, because I was pretty tired of looking at them. And Jason? Jason came home to my wonderful cookies. My wonderful mess. It turns out he thought they were perfect. And me, I think I'll buy cookies from the store next time :)


The Recipe for Sugar Cookies -

Ingredients:

• 1 cup(s) (2 sticks) butter (no substitutions), softened
• 1/2 cup(s)sugar
• 1 large egg
• 1 tablespoon(s) vanilla extract
• 3 cup(s) all-purpose flour
• 1/2 teaspoon(s) baking powder
  
• Ornamental frosting

Directions:

1. In large bowl, with mixer at low speed, beat butter and sugar until blended. Increase speed to high; beat until light and creamy. At low speed, beat in egg and vanilla. Beat in flour and baking powder just until blended.
2. Divide dough into 4 equal pieces. Wrap each piece with plastic wrap and refrigerate 1 hour or until dough is firm enough to roll. (Or place dough in freezer for 30 minutes.)
3. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. On lightly floured surface, with floured rolling pin, roll 1 piece of dough 1/8 inch thick. With floured 3- to 4-inch assorted cookies cutters, cut dough into as many cookies as possible; wrap and refrigerate trimmings. Place cookies, 1 inch apart, on ungreased large cookie sheet.
4. Bake cookies 10 to 12 minutes or until lightly browned. Transfer cookies to wire rack to cool. Repeat with remaining dough and trimmings.
5. When cookies are cool, prepare Ornamental Frosting if you like; use to decorate cookies as desired. Set cookies aside to allow frosting to dry completely, about 1 hour. Store cookies in tightly covered container (with waxed paper between layers, if decorated) at room temperature up to 2 weeks, or in freezer up to 3 months.

Recipe for Sugar Cookie Icing:

Ingredients:

1 cup confectioners' sugar 2 teaspoons milk 2 teaspoons light corn syrup

1/4 teaspoon almond extract assorted food coloring

Directions:

1.	In a small bowl, stir together confectioners' sugar and milk until smooth. Beat in corn syrup and almond extract until icing is smooth and glossy. If icing is too thick, add more corn syrup.
2.	Divide into separate bowls, and add food colorings to each to desired intensity. Dip cookies, or paint them with a brush.

Muffin

Some call her Snow White. I call her Muffin. Jason calls her Cotton. Whatever her name really is -- she's the neighborhood cat.

I don't remember when it was exactly that she began to grace us with her presence. Maybe four months ago? That's seems about right. She showed up in our neighborhood as if she had always been there. As if she had always owned this street.

I admit when I first met her I felt sorry for her. She was a mess of fluffy white cotton hair caked with mud and specks of leaves and sticks tangled throughout her coat. Her big yellow green eyes drew pity out of any one who locked eyes with her. She couldn't have been a whole year old, maybe six months. Her skinny little body made you wonder just how long it had been since her last meal.

I decided to take her on. I grab two bowls from inside and filled one with water and the other with some of Murphy (our inside cat)'s food. Jason couldn't believe what I was doing and said that before long I would become the neighborhood cat woman. But she's could die, I told him. She would starve, no one is taking care of her...

That's how is started. That was Muffin in her first days in our neighborhood. Over the next few weeks a unique transformation took place...

At first I noticed a love or a hate for muffin from our surrounding neighbors. She ate their plants. She harassed their dogs. They sprayed her with hoses. Some had adopted her as their own. Some had even named her Snow White which I thought was a ridiculous name. She was not Snow White and I would never call her that. One week, a pink flea collar showed up on her neck from the neighbor two doors down that's when I realized that Muffin's visit to our neighborhood was more permanent than anyone had hoped for.

Once Muffin knew she had us, it all went down hill from there. One day I was driving home from work and as I neared our house I saw her walking down our driveway. She'll move, I thought. Cat's are good about dodging cars for the most part. As I pulled my car into the drive. She didn't move. In fact she wouldn't budge. I honked and she sat there staring at me. Finally, I threw half of my body out of the car door and fussed at her. She moved alright, but only after minutes of fussing went by and aggravated drivers lined their cars up behind mine.

That wasn't the only thing.

The ragged washed up Muffin from the early days was no longer visible. Muffin was looking good. Her once tattered coat was a puffy fluff of pure cotton. She was beautiful. But noticing the change in her appearance made me notice something else just as important - her stomach.

Muffin's stomach was growing at an alarming rate. Is she pregnant, we wondered. We - meaning all the neighbors were noticing it too. Muffin's possible pregnancy was the topic of conversation among the neighbors for days. We wondered how many kittens she would have, we wondered where she would have them, and we wondered who had claim to which one of the kittens she would have. Would they be all white like she was or would they look like the father whoever he was. It never dawned on us that she wasn't pregnant.

Muffin's fat belly was the result of her dining habits. One weekday night when the neighbors sat on their porch swings and watered their gardens the truth came out. As one neighbor placed a bowl of food for Muffin on her porch it started a "You feed Snow White (Muffin)?!, well so do I!". Muffin had been making the rounds. Literally. She started on our side of the street in the mornings and crossed the street to hit up some houses in the afternoon.


I knew all to well the guilt she caused. I too had fallen victim. Every morning since she had shown up in our neighborhood, muffin would meet me on my porch. Her shrill cries were enough to send me running back into the house and back out with bowls of food. One day I had had enough, I rushed out the door and patted her on the head and said 'Not today Muffin I'm going be late'. As I pulled out the driveway I tried not to look at her but she glared at me. I pulled into the street and turned in the first u-turn to make my way to the bridge. Glancing back at the house, I couldn't believe it. Muffin had never left my porch. Her eyes followed my car as it moved down the street. The farther I got away the more pitiful looking she got. At that moment the guilt swept over. Before I could even really think about it I was u-turning again, jumping out of my car, running into the house and throwing food into Muffin's bowl. Everything I had in my arms (my lunch, my purse, my keys) fell all over the place. You know what she did? She took a sniff at it, realized it was a new kind of cat food and trotted back down the porch steps. And me? well I was late.

That's muffin. No matter how much she aggravates, no matter that she harasses your dogs, no matter that she almost peed on your neighbor's kid because she doesn't doesn't care where she goes, you love her because she is after all the neighborhood cat and I guess that means she ours.